Bodyguards FAQ

Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends - Bodyguards FAQ v 1.1
Written by Ultrace (ultrace@ultrace.com)
Last Updated 1/23/03
Contents
I. Introduction
II. Disclaimer
III. Version History
IV. Bodyguards in Dynasty Warriors 3 and Xtreme Legends
V. Frequently Asked Questions
VI. On Bodyguard Use
VII. Advancing Bodyguards
VIII. Bodyguard Weapons and Items
IX. Normal Bodyguards vs. Warrior Bodyguards
X. Contributors
I. INTRODUCTION
This FAQ is intended to help players of Dynasty Warriors 3: Xtreme Legends
[DW3:XL] with developing, maintaining and using their bodyguards in the
game. While the Xtreme Legends expansion, in my own opinion, is a great
work, it is not without its problems. In particular, due to the increased
difficulty of this expansion and the weakness of newbie bodyguards, rapid
bodyguard death--or rather, retreat--is a common problem within the game,
but one which can be overcome with just a little work.
II. DISCLAIMER
This is my first attempt at a FAQ; although I have taken many efforts to
double-verify and confirm all the information contained here, there may be
inconsistencies or incorrect info. I will not be held responsible for any
ill result which comes of using this FAQ. I reserve the right to not update
this FAQ further for any reason or to ignore corrective information sent
to me. (I welcome corrections by e-mail, but be aware that my time is
limited and any such information may not be incorporated for some time.)
This document contains some spoilers about the rewards for completing some
characters' musou modes, and how to obtain items and rewards. These
spoilers are not labeled. Caveat lector.
This document is copyrighted by me. It may be posted to any website,
newsgroup, or other medium so long as the content is unaltered. The color,
font, and other semantic formatting may be changed as desired.
III. VERSION HISTORY
1.0 - This is the first version. Comparison of bodyguards between DW3 and
DW3:XL, information on using bodyguards, levelling them, and their items
is included.
1.1 - Some minor revisions to text. Added maximums for bodyguard items,
taken from Muni Shinobu's DW3:XL FAQ. Also added section IX on Warrior
Bodyguards.
IV. BODYGUARDS IN DYNASTY WARRIORS 3 AND XTREME LEGENDS
When Koei created DW3:XL, the existing bodyguard system from DW3 was
completely overhauled, and for the better. In DW3, each character had a
troop of 2, 4, 6 or 8 bodyguards, depending on the character and his or
her rank of gained points in the game. Each character's bodyguards had
differing stats, so that Zhao Yun might start out with defense-heavy
bodyguards while say, Xaihou Dun might be offense-heavy, and Gan Ning's
bodyguards might be balanced. All bodyguards were the same gender (male)
and of the standard male type. Their colors varied depending on the
alignment of the character they belonged to. They were all known as
"Bodyguard." The bodyguards could be assigned to either "attack" or
"defense" as their strategies They could not equip weapons or items.
Bodyguards in DW3:XL differ in the following ways:
1. Bodyguards no longer belong to an individual character. Instead, you
may create up to four troops of bodyguards which each can be used by any
character in any stage. Thus, a brand new character having trouble can be
equipped with a troop of maxxed-out bodyguards for full support. When you
first boot up the game, four generic troops are created for you, each with
brand-new stats.
2. Each troop starts out with the same stats. The troop gains experience
points as a percentage of the points that your character gains in any
given stage. In addition, as the bodyguards advance in points and gain
levels ("advancement points") you can determine which of their stats
increases--rank, attack, defense or life and musou. All troops start out
with 2 bodyguards, and increase by 2 bodyguards for every 25000 experience
points the troop gains, to a maximum of 8 bodyguards at 75000 points.
3. Each troop can have its own gender and race. At the outset, only
standard male and female guards are available, but by completing some
characters' musou modes, an additional type of male and female bodyguard
can be unlocked. Once selected, a troop's race and gender cannot be
changed unless the troop is wiped out and recreated from scratch. You may
encounter female guards for the enemy now as well.
4. Each troop can have its own color of uniform. A troop's uniform can be
changed at the beginning of any stage. At the outset, only red, blue,
green, purple and "normal" colors are available. Completing some
characters' musou modes unlocks additional colors for bodyguard
uniforms--yellow, peach and black.
5. Each bodyguard in the troop has its own name. When you create the troop,
you assign names to all eight bodyguards, even though the troop only starts
with 2 bodyguards. Once selected, a bodyguard's name cannot be changed
unless its troop is disbanded and recreated.
6. Troops can be assigned four different strategies to use in combat:
Attack (go all-out with standard and charge attacks), Defense (use only
standard attacks, do not use charge attacks that might leave the guard
open to counterattack), Support (use only charge attacks, and focus on any
archers first if they are present), and Shield (increases defense rating of
the guards, who try to surround the character and do nothing but block
during the stage.)
7. Guards can equip differing weapons and items. Each of the five guard
weapons has three levels of weapons which can be acquired during stages.
There are also ten equippable bodyguard items, although only one can be
used by a troop at any given time. All weapons and nine of the bodyguard
items are found during normal stages, and picked up like your own weapons
and items. They are in fact indistinguishable from normal weapons and items
until you see what they are at the end of the stage.
V. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q: My bodyguards keep dying before I can even complete a stage. What am I
doing wrong?
A: New bodyguards start out very weak and can be wiped out by the enemy
very easily. Since enemies in the game are slightly modified to the power
of the character you're using, try taking a weaker character into a
low-level stage on easy or novice difficulty. After one or two passes
(about 4000-6000 guard experience points) and a few advancement points in
defense, your bodyguards should have enough advancement to survive on the
lower-level normal stages if you play carefully, and eat surplus food
when you can. If you find an item for your bodyguards which raises their
defense, be sure to have them equip it. (See Section VII for more advice
on advancing bodyguards.)
Q: My character is at 99999 experience. Can my bodyguards still gain points
with him/her?
A: Yes, the points the bodyguards receive at the end ofthe stage are based
on how many you amass with your character, not how many the character
actually receives. Use caution, though. A character with 99999 experience
is probably pretty pumped up, which means the game will adjust the enemies
to be tougher, and they'll be able to kill your bodyguards easier.
Q: Normal enemies are dropping items. Is this a bug?
A: No. New to DW3:XL is the ability for normal enemies to drop weapons and
items. This is more likely to happen on higher-ranked enemies ,
particularly Guards and Guard Captains, but I have also seen items dropped
by Majors on occasion. What affects the likelihood of these dropping is
unknown. The weapons and items may be for you or for your bodyguards.
Q: How do I unlock more bodyguard options?
A: Defeat the musou mode of the Xtreme Legends characters. Beating musou
with Meng Huo unlocks male Nanman bodyguards, Zhu Rhong unlocks female
Nanman, Zhang Jiao unlocks yellow uniforms, Diao Chan unlocks peach
uniforms, and Dong Zhuo unlocks black uniforms. Lu Bu and Yuan Shao do not
unlock any bodyguard options that I can tell after beating their musou
modes.
Q: What's the tenth bodyguard item? How do I get it?
A: The final bodyguard item and only one which cannot be dropped by an
enemy is the BG Healing Scroll (known in the Japanese version as the
Bodyguard Complete Book), which allows your bodyguards to automatically
recover their life one time, much like officers in battle do. To get this
item you will need to complete the Iron Man challenge with a score of 350
or higher.
VI. ON BODYGUARD USE
This section is more based upon my own personal opinion and experience, so
if you're looking for a section with numbers and facts to support it, by
all means skip ahead.
In DW3, bodyguards were limited in their use. They couldn't be told to take
out those pesky archers first, they didn't seem to want to shoot anyone
above them, and were extraordinarily reluctant (to say the least) to use
their musou attacks. Things are changed somewhat in DW3:XL, but it's
important to remember that bodyguards are not primarily for killing your
opponents, but for saving your life. Therefore, the best use for your
bodyguards is generally to have them run interference. Bodyguards armed
with bows or crossbows can snipe enemy officers from a distance and give
you the opening you may need. With melee weapons, they can distract the
officers and allow you to come around from behind and attack. Although
even a maxxed bodyguard won't survive that long in Very Hard mode, while
they live they're a godsend for taking down enemy officers.
In stages where you have problems with archers or are short of arrows (such
as the Raid on the Bandit Fortress), set your bodyguards to use a bow or
crossbow and the Support command. They'll take out archers in towers and
allow you to conserve arrows. In stages where you're having problems
keeping a particular ally alive, set the bodyguards to melee weapons with
the Attack command, and wade into the fray. The support will generally
allow your ally to retreat to a safe distance or recover life, and instead
of just you trying to fend off a small army, you'll have up to eight
helpers. For casual gameplay, I generally set my bodyguards to bow with
the Defense command. They'll give supporting fire, but not enough to get
in my way or steal too many kills.
As you gain more bodyguards, particularly if they're set to using bows and
crossbows behind you, always keep an eye out for weapons and items dropped
by the enemy. If you press ahead without checking, you could pass a number
of valuable pickups.
VII. ADVANCING BODYGUARDS
As mentioned, bodyguards gain experience points at the end of a stage based
upon how many experience points your character gained during the battle
(bodyguards gain about half the experience points your character does.)
This is also modified by how many bodyguards survived the battle versus
how many entered it. If you enter a battle with two bodyguards and one is
forced to retreat, then your bodyguard troop will receive approximately
half the experience it would have normally. This makes it much easier to
level your bodyguards once you get four or six of them, since losing one
will have less of an impact.
To gain more points during a battle for your bodyguards to feed on, do the
following:
1. Defeat more soldiers. Reaching 1000 kills can not only save your side
due to the morale increase, it results in big points.
2. Defeat more officers, including sub-officers. Each officer is worth a
specific value; the more famous or tougher, the better.
3. Secure enemy gates. Each gate is worth 100 points.
4. Complete the stage more quickly. A very quick completion can yield over
2000 points. Some people report getting about 3000 for super-fast finishes.
5. Perform more and better combos. A "Good" combo is worth 10 points, but a
"Perfect" combo is worth over 120.
6. Take more bodyguards with you. Each bodyguard who survives the battle is
worth 200 points at the end.
7. Keep your bodyguards around. Each bodyguard who retreats is a -300 point
penalty.
Unlike what the manual says, bodyguards do not gain advancement points
every 1000 experience points, at least not after the first two. Much like
your character's rank, bodyguard ranks become more difficult to achieve.
You will gain advancement points at 1000 xp, 2000 xp, 4000 xp, 6000 xp,
8000 xp, 10000 xp, etc., in increasing increments. However, by the time
your bodyguards reach 10000 experience points, they will have gained six
advancement points, enough to make them sufficiently tough to safely take
into normal mode if you spend the points wisely, so maxxing out bodyguards
is not necessary to make them useful.
Advancement points can be spent on the following stats:
Rank - Affects the bodyguard's appearance (for males), their maximum life
and musou, and how often they attack and block. Since rank increases
maximum life and musou, you should never spend advancement points on
advancing actual life and musou until the bodyguard's rank is at maximum.
Only three points can be spent on rank, taking your Private to Sergeant,
then Major, then Guard.
Life and Musou - Increases the maximum life and musou of the bodyguard. As
said previously, you should not spend points on this until the bodyguard's
rank is completed. Even then, it's generally better to raise defense
instead of the guard's life. A guard with low defense but high life is
still hot butter for the enemy knife to cut through, just more of it.
Attack - How much damage the bodyguard does in combat. This is nice, but
remembering that your bodyguards are more for support and less for clearing
out armies, I generally place this as less important than defense.
Defense - Arguably the most important stat (along with rank.) This affects
how much damage your bodyguard takes in combat, along with their speed and
ability to evade enemies. When maxxed out (at around 12-15 advancements),
the bodyguard can even survive for some time in the low-level stages on
very hard mode.
Since bodyguards start out very weak and easy to kill, I recommend that
your first ten advancement points be spent like this:
Defense -> Defense -> Defense -> Rank -> Defense -> Rank -> Defense ->
Rank -> Defense -> Defense
By this point, you will be approaching, if not at, four bodyguards instead
of two, and the bodyguards will be strong enough to survive most stages on
normal mode. You can then safely start pumping up their attack or
life/musou if you desire, or continue down the path of defense (which is
what I do until it reaches the maximum.)
VIII. BODYGUARD ITEMS
Bodyguards can now equip powered up weapons and one non-weapon item per
troop. While most of the items aren't very useful, they're all better than
nothing, which is what your bodyguards could equip in DW3. Apart from the
BG Healing Scroll, all the equippable bodyguard items are just bodyguard
versions of regular items you can equip. The items are:
BG Peacock Urn - Increases maximum hit points. This is handy if you can get
a good amount on it, particularly if you don't have a good defense item.
The maximum limit for this item is +32.
BG Dragon Amulet - Increases maximum musou gauge. While bodyguards do pull
off musou attacks in DW3:XL, the length of the musou bar is pretty much
negligible. Bodyguards "holding down the button" to get the full extent of
their musou bar just isn't that important. The maximum limit for this item
is +32.
BG Tiger Amulet - Increases attack. Pretty self-explanatory. If you want
your bodyguards to have more punch and you can't advance them anymore,
this is the way to do it. The max for this item is +20.
BG Tortoise Amulet - Increases defense. Once you've put all the points you
can into defense, this will be the next step in slowing the tide of damage.\
The max for this item is +20.
BG Huang's Bow - Increases bow attack. If you have your bodyguards set to
bow, this is better than the Tiger Amulet for increasing damage. I'm not
sure if it has any effect on crossbow bodyguards. If your bodyguards are
using melee weapons, then this is completely useless. The max for this item
is +12.
BG Shell Armor - Increases bow defense. You'd need a relatively high
modifier on this item to have enough of an impact to make it better than
the Tortoise Amulet (since that affects all damage taken and not just from
arrows), but for bodyguards set to Support, this can help prevent them
being cut to ribbons while they seek out those archers for you. The max
for this item is +12.
BG Speed Scroll - Increases speed. I find this to be unnecessary,
especially for bodyguards with moderate defense, who can keep up with most
characters who are themselves equipped with a speed scroll. The max for
this item is +12.
BG Wind Scroll - Increases attack range. For melee weapons, and with a high
enough modifier, this might be worthwhile to check out, but I would
probably stick with the BG Tiger Amulet or BG Elixir for fighting machines.
The max for this item is +12.
BG Elixir - Increases musou charge. Bodyguards do use musou attacks now,
and they can use them quite frequently, especially when in a pinch and
their rank is high. Equipping this will allow them to charge that meter
faster. (Ironically, in playing DW3 and DW3:XL for well over 200 hours,
I've never received an elixir for myself, and I've gotten three for
bodyguards since I started playing DW3:XL.) The max for this item is +12.
BG Healing Scroll - Allows each bodyguard to recover their life, but only
once per battle. This works much like officers on the battlefield who
regenerate themselves; the bodyguard pauses for a moment to summon up
energy, and recovers life. This appears to trigger when the bodyguard is
around 20-25% of their hit points. Once acquired, this item will probably
help more in keeping the bodyguards alive than a good Peacock Urn or
Tortoise Amulet.
Each of these items can have their limits broken like the normal items you
find on the Very Hard mode stages. As for getting high values, I haven't
had a lot of success in this, with a +12 Tiger Amulet and +8 Elixir being
my biggest finds. There is a strong likelihood that playing harder stages,
harder modes, and getting higher combo points will result in higher-quality
items, but most of the stages I beat in researching this were on normal or
easy mode, for the sake of speed. (I beat the Wu Navy Skirmish on very hard
mode, but the items were all for my character and not that great. Yeah,
just the Wu Navy Skirmish. Very hard is too tough for me...)
It's been mentioned on the GameFAQs boards that achieving high combo
amounts prior to picking up weapons or items will have an effect, while
picking up items and then proceeding to an area to rack up combo points
(such as the south gate in Yi Ling) will have less or no effect. I have not
been able to extensively or successfully test this yet.
Bodyguard weapons come in three flavors for each weapon, some of which are
taken from the weapons for playable characters (such as the Dragon Spear.)
They come with assorted stats, but with the exception of a single +20 life
and a +5 attack, I have failed to get more than +1 on any stat for a
bodyguard weapon in any stage I've played, regardless of difficulty or
combo points. I've also not managed to get more than 2 stats on a weapon.
I'm still researching to find out if there's something I'm missing here.
IX. NORMAL BODYGUARDS VS. WARRIOR BODYGUARDS
New to XL is the ability to take a playable character into battle as your
bodyguard in Free Mode stages.
Because of the PS2's memory limitations, only 14 different officer models
can generally be loaded into the game, allowing for 11 unique characters
and 3 generic officer types. Therefore, if you pick a stage with a lot of
unique characters, and choose to play as a character not already in that
stage, you've used up the one spare character model the programmers allowed
for, and your choice of bodyguards will be limited to characters already
within the stage.
You cannot pick as your warrior bodyguard any character on your side who
has special lines or functions, or who is part of the victory or defeat
condition on your side. You can pick any character from the enemy side as
your bodyguard without trouble. They will simply be a doppelganger of the
enemy, as if you had picked that character yourself to play as.
If you pick for your warrior bodyguard a character who is already in the
stage on your side, that character's position in the stage will be
replaced with a generic officer. Depending on the difficulty of the stage,
this can cause a disaster. If on the other hand, Very Hard mode just isn't
hard enough, try taking a warrior bodyguard who is one of your better
officers in the stage to accelerate your army's destruction, like Zhao Yun
in the Shu side of Wu Zhang Plains.
You cannot pick a warrior bodyguard in musou mode, probably because of the
vast number of characters that would be present in all the different stages
you play.
While taking Daio Qiao into battle with Zhou Yu as your bodyguard, or Cao
Cao with Dian Wei, etc. is a nice novelty, the question becomes, normal or\
warrior?
Warrior bodyguards get to retain all of their base stats when you take them
into a stage. A maxxed-out Lu Bu is still a maxxed-out Lu Bu. I've taken
maxxed warrior bodyguards and maxxed normal bodyguards to the same stage on
the same difficulty and let them go at it with enemies to test this. Also,
load a stage with your maxxed out character, remove the items and weapons
that increase their stats, and compare them with a maxxed bodyguard, and
you'll see that they are very similar in the stats that are at their
maximums. However, warriors cannot equip items or weapons, and you cannot
give them commands--they do their own thing, and will not shoot arrows.
They do not tend to follow you as closely as normal bodyguards. And,
there is only one of them, and when he or she bites the dust, that's it.
Normal bodyguards, even at maximum experience, have stats which are weaker
than that of a maxxed-out character; you can max out only two, at best, of
a bodyguard's three (four if you count life and musou as separate) stats
before running out of experience, while a character can have their life,
musou, attack and defense all ramped up to the top. Normal bodyguards,
however, can equip items which give them more flexibility than warrior
bodyguards, with increased musou charging, self-healing, and stat increases
from items and/or weapons. You can give them commands and change those
commands during the course of the stage as needed. You can also have up to
eight of them, and regardless of how powerful your maxxed out Lu Bu, Zhang
Liao or Guan Yu might be, eight maxxed out bodyguards are just plain
better, if admittedly not as cool.
For casual play, if your life isn't on the line, then either choice will
work, and it's certainly more fun to me to bring in the pumped-up character
than go with the normal bodyguards. But in a clinch situation, a troop of
advanced normal bodyguards (50000+ experience) is almost definitely the way
to go for the proper support of you and your allies.
X. CONTRIBUTORS
Some of the information in this FAQ was gleaned from the message boards at
www.gamefaqs.com. In particular, how to acquire the "Bodyguard Complete
Book" (although I had to find its real name myself and how it worked), and
info on normal enemies dropping items not being a bug. Shadow780's theory
on increasing items by achieving combos before picking up the items also
came from the boards.
Info on the maximum limit for bodyguard items comes from Muni Shinobu's
DW3:XL FAQ, v3.10, which can be found at www.gamefaqs.com.